Composer Actor Styles

When applying a label in SOLIDWORKS Composer I end up changing its properties every single time, and I have had enough. I know with SOLIDWORKS if you constantly change something you can adjust the template in order to make those options default. With Composer a label does not fall within the template settings but are controlled by what we call a “style”.

A style is saved properties for specific actors that can quickly adjust specified settings. In this case we will be saving a style for a label. To create a style we first must add a label and adjust the properties to how we want it to be. Here is what my default label looks like.

Once we have placed our label we can now adjust the properties to our liking. Be sure to make note of the settings you changed because we will have to know these later. The settings I changed are the text color, font, text size, label background color and the actual text from component name to BOM ID.

Here is what it looks like with my changes:

Opening up the style workshop and selecting on our label, will bring over the properties for labels. We must first then specify that we want to create a new label. See below.

After creating a new style we must specify which properties will be controlled by the style. Turning on the checkbox selects that property. I am selecting on the properties that I adjusted previously and maybe a few additional ones. See below.

Before we finish creating our style there is one very important setting that we must enable, “Set as Default”. At the very top of the Workshop we must specify that this label is going to be the one used by default. Once we have selected all of the properties we can close down the style workshop and begin adding more labels without having to adjust any properties.

This is so much easier than changing the properties every single time!